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XBMC 12.0 Released With HD Audio, PVR, Android

01-29-2013, 11:50 AM

Phoronix: XBMC 12.0 Released With HD Audio, PVR, Android

After going through some development releases in the past few months, XBMC 12.0 "Frodo" was officially released this morning. XBMC 12.0 packs in a heck of a lot of features for this open-source cross-platform multimedia software...

You can use MakeMKV for that. The demo version allows 30 days of Blu-Ray/HD-DVD ripping (and the license is worth the 60 ?). MakeMKV has a set of audio profiles and with the newest version of ffmpeg installed you can even convert streams on-the-fly to FLAC (but you don't have to with TrueHD since it's playable with OSS software). For DTS-HD MA you also need a dtsdecoderdll.dll from ArcSoft DTS Decoder 1.1.0.8 (yes, on Linux).

But I have a question too: I don't get it exactly with this release announcement. With the "new XBMC Audio Engine" we get real DTS-HD Master Audio decoding? For real?! Not only the DTS core but the full Master Audio stream? For years forum threads were discussing that this will never happen in open source software because the DTS specs are so evil closed. Can this new XBMC Audio Engine decode DTS-HD MA in software or is it only another pass-through?

Comment

I tried fiddling with XBMC a few years abo, I think back at V10. I have a mythbackend setup running and am not 100% happy with mythfrontend. I was looking at XBMC as an alternative front-end, since it advertises the ability to talk to MythTV. It worked, but at the time was clunkier than mythfrontend, at least for accessing my mythbackend. I also had troubles building XBMC on my fiddle-around system, and ended up uninstalling it, just to make updates go more smoothly.

Time passes.... In the meantime my mythbackend had found its way up to 0.25.2, and since I did this experiment, it's moved to 0.25.3.

Seeing the XBMC 12 announcement I decided maybe it was time to try again. This time it installed easily, and I located and installed the MythTV plugin.

Unfortunately the MythTV plugin talks to 0.25.0, not to my at-the-time 0.25.2 or current 0.25.3. It would seem to me that this would be a big enough problem that XBMC should have either multiple plugins or some sort of version-adapting wrapper.